I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Audre Lorde wrote like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Toni Morrison writes like
Charles Dickens

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Zora Neale Hurston wrote like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Cool, huh? Glad to know I’m in good company.

So. After examining chest x-rays for an unrelated roller derby non-injury, my doctor told me she suspected emphysema (or COPD, basically the pharmaceutical industry’s non-threatening acronym for emphysema and/or bronchitis). An initial round of tests appear to support my doctor’s inference.

There are more tests to come, and plenty of conditions to rule out (including pulmonary excellence). Frankly, society isn’t particularly invested in my body, either. At least not my lungs. *ahem* However, after scouring the internet for fun facts, I have a couple of observations.

First, just as deathfat! isn’t necessarily as deadly as some would have you believe, thinhealthwhoooooo!!!! isn’t axiomatic, either.

Some people are just thin. In the absence of eating disorders. Not only are there plenty of health conditions (I dare say most of them) that can afflict otherwise healthy-seeming and thin individuals, but sometimes thinness in-and-of itself can present problems. Those of us who are really tall and really thin may have weak spots in the tops of our lungs, which may rupture as a result of air pressure changes, violent yawning, whichever. Collapsed lungs aren’t the worst thing in the world, but they’re hardly pleasant.

Y’all knew that, though.

A second observation (or proposition) is that the cultural dialogue about lung impairment shares a lot of space with fat hatred.

Emphysema is almost entirely preventable.
Emphysema is a result of your bad life choices. Ms. Winehouse?
Your lungs are ugly and unglamorous, and you’ve brought this upon yourself. Ms. Turlington?

Yes, smoking is bad for you (more on this later). However, regardless of my situation, it’s entirely possible for otherwise fit, athletic, young people to develop chronic pulmonary issues. There are conditions (Alpha-1, and Marfan syndrome) that often lead to emphysema or other pulmonary unpleasantness in previously healthy young people.

And of course, smoking matters. So does exposure to toxic chemicals at work, at home, and in the air in one’s neighborhood. Sadly, breathing clean air is privilege correlated to having other privilege. Patterns of asthma incidence, for example, bear this out.

And about smoking. It’s bad for you. And most smokers know this. I suspect all of the horrifying information out there about emphysema (thank you, BTW) is a crude attempt to encourage smokers to quit (or never start). While smoking cessation is a laudable goal (and my lungs thank you), it would behoove the medical community to acknowledge that smoking exists within a cultural context. The American Heart Association contends (with evidence!) that the tobacco industry disproportionately targets minorities and women. In the US, LGBTQ people are substantially more likely to smoke than their straight counterparts.

Smokers are not infants in need of teaching, they’re people targeted by corporations that wish to sell an addictive and deadly product. Fat people aren’t infants either (although ZOMG!!!!11!). And they don’t necessarily make bad choices, either. They may eat well. They may exercise regularly. They may have quit smoking. Yet you wouldn’t know it from OMFGDEATHFAT!!!!!11!!1!!!1!

But what about those folks who do eat horrifying processed food? There’s a huge industry that manufactures HFCS-laden food, which is eaten by plenty of smart people. Kraft Foods, for example, at one point had an interest in keeping folks’ stomachs filled with Velveeta, KD, Jell-O, and Kool-Aid, with perhaps a Marlboro cigarette for after dinner. The consumers of these empty calories, are disproportionately poor, and otherwise otherwise are disproportionately unlikely to have access to healthier alternatives. In other words, the manufactured food industry and the tobacco industry target the same populations.

Meanwhile, HFCS is taking its tool on our lungs, the oil required for industrial corn farming migrating across the gulf, trucks and trains filled with well-traveled food rumbling past our homes.

FWIW, I’ve got a pretty large personal stake in one of the lawsuits in question.

Count this as another fallout of the recession, where the judicial branch is used by special interests in high-profile cases to impose spending decisions on the executive and legislative branches.

The result [of governments trying to break the law?] includes court decisions that rule on one major element of spending — for example an effort to restore school aid or to block state worker furloughs — on its legal merits, not whether taxpayers can afford it, [Patricia Salkin, associate dean of the University of Albany's Government Law Center] said. [emphasis mine]

Chuniece Patterson was pregnant and complaining of abdominal pain in her cell at the Justice Center jail in Syracuse.

Fourteen hours later, she was dead.

The jail’s records of Patterson’s medical care give no indication that anyone examined her abdomen. No pelvic exam. No ultrasound. Any of them would’ve shown she had an ectopic pregnancy in her fallopian tube and would’ve probably indicated that it had ruptured, according to a doctor. Surgery could’ve saved her life, he said.

The first time [Deputy Diane Stech saw Patterson on the floor], Patterson obeyed Stech’s order to get up, the report said. Fifteen minutes later, Patterson was on the floor again, leaning on the toilet and splashing water in her face, Stech wrote. The deputy told her to stop and Patterson rolled onto the floor, the report said….

“I looked down at inmate Patterson, again told inmate to get off the floor,” Stech wrote. “It looked as if the inmate looked at me. I continued with my tour.”

Inmate Rhonda Dunn said she saw Patterson through her cell window. Patterson was lying on the floor, Dunn said. She’d heard Patterson moaning all night, and watched her writhing in pain, Dunn said.

“I was like, ‘Miss Diane, get over there!’” Dunn said she told Stech.

On her last visit to Patterson’s cell, Stech found her unresponsive, the report said. Stech called in other deputies and medical workers, who tried to revive her, the records show.

There’s not much to be said that hasn’t been said before. Assuming that authorities were unaware (or more likely, indifferent) to criticisms that police target minority communities for particularly harsh punishments and that jails are exceedingly dangerous places where authorities punish inmates (notably LGBT people and heterosexual women) with unofficially sanctioned rape, assault, denial of health care and other forms of violence that fly in the face of the idea of jails as sites of “rehabilitation”, it’s hard to believe that they were unprepared to deal with Ms. Patterson’s ectopic pregnancy. An inmate died a similar death in the same jail in the 1990s.

Police entered the Jones’ family on suspicions that a murder suspect was present. Upon entering the house, an officer’s gun fired, shooting and killing 7 year-old Aiyana Jones.

“I saw them (police) running with my daughter out of the house. They had my mother on the floor, and they just kept me there for like two hours,” said Charles Jones, 25. “I knew it was bad, and they probably had my baby at the hospital, because someone asked me if she had any allergies.

“Her blood was everywhere and I was trying to stay calm, but nobody would talk to me. None of them even tried to console me.”

Erik Saunders, 43, a family friend, said the shooting was reminiscent of civil rights era.

“This is like 1960s all over,” he said. “Police have no respect for the citizens of this city.”

The Jones family is in my thoughts as they attempt to process these unthinkable events.

I wonder if the judge in question has ever sought help for domestic violence. There are folks in Syracuse that offer assistance. However, I don’t suggest calling the police. Based on the stories I’ve heard about police calls in response to domestic violence, the SPD is *cough* unhelpful, even on occasions when they bother to send someone. I’d refer to the police reports, but they don’t exist in either of the cases I’m thinking of. I’m sure judge Aloi is conveniently ignorant of all of this, though, so onward:

Defense lawyer Thomas Ryan asked Aloi to consider even less than the 12 years agreed to when Comer pleaded guilty. Ryan said Comer had a litany of problems: a learning disability, significant developmental impairment, major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar and antisocial disorders and poor impulse control.

He also said Comer had a lengthy history of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that started with her father when she was a child.

12 years? How about 120? :eyeroll:

There’s room for further commentary here, but yeah. 12 years.

People who disagree with the government of New York are evil, stupid, children. Who are fat. And will destroy America.

I sense a pattern.

And it’s not funny.

Permit me to demonstrate:
“Hello, good Sir! I would like to voice a disagreement with your proposed policy.”

“Run along to play in your clubhouse, you thumb-sucking bed-wetter.”

Okay, perhaps that was a little funny. And perhaps it is a given that thumb-sucking bed-wetters should go play in their clubhouses. However, that’s really changing the subject. Unoriginal. Unproductive. Un-un-insulting.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, New York is broke. Pffft… fatties.

*Technically, it’s New York’s State Health Department, but it seems clear where the talking points are coming from.

NYT: Charter Schools’ New Cheerleaders: Financiers

The Albany Times-Union reports on Governor Paterson’s press conference on the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act.

Video of a Q&A with Gov. Paterson on the subject of SUNY, furloughs [Sorry, no transcript]

Also, in case you were wondering, the “issue” is some folks’ right to exist.